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By Air

While would-be illegal migrants might prefer the comfort and speed of a direct flight to the United States, successfully using this method is difficult, says James Chaparro, director of anti-smuggling at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

"The vast majority enter via land routes," he told the Washington File in a recent interview. "There are not large numbers of Chinese who fly directly to the United States by air.

"There are several reasons for that," Chaparro said. "Document security over the last several years has become better; and with the introduction of new laser visas and more and more countries using secure passports, air smuggling has become more difficult."

According to INS figures, 1,814,729 undocumented individuals were apprehended at U.S. airports in Fiscal Year 2000 (October 1, 1999 through September 30, 2000).

And in a sample of 300 illegal migrants studied by Ko-Lin Chin, author of "Smuggled Chinese," 64 percent of the illegal immigrants who flew directly into the United States were detected by U.S. authorities at their point of entry.

Chaparro said that Chinese illegal migrants generally are forced to use a variety of methods and long, torturous routes to enter the United States.

"For example, they may leave China by air or land or sea to go to Thailand or to Taiwan," he said, "and from there they'll catch a plane to Ecuador or Venezuela.

"From Ecuador or Venezuela they will take a boat up to Guatemala and cross land the rest of the way."

Other common routes take the illegal migrants through Eastern or Southern Europe to the Caribbean countries, he said. Once in the Caribbean, they might be taken by fast boats to the U.S. mainland.

Often, migrants are smuggled by sea to Central America and then work their way north to the United States via land routes, Chaparro said.

These circuitous routes, however, expose illegal migrants to greater hardships and the risks of abuse at the hands of their smugglers and other potential predators, according to the research of Ko-Lin Chin and other scholars.